Today's economy is growing more and more dependent on e-commerce, online transactions and online presences. In large part, the world now requires entities (e.g., professionals, businesses, individuals, politicians, non-profit organizations) to have an online presence. Even where entities have their own online identity, these identities are augmented by an always growing portfolio of data surrounding the entity. For instance, each transaction, purchase, interaction with customer support or other event is likely to be noted, most likely permanently, on one or more spaces on the Internet.
The Internet is comprised of thousands of sites where customers may rate entities, rank entities, comment on transactions and experiences they have had with entities and more. Each of these interactions may be viewable by an entity's potential customers, clients, family members, employers or other third party. Positive and negative alike, every interaction is a fixture that the entity may or may not be able to affect.
One major issue is that there is no way currently for a business or a consumer to get an overall rating of a particular entity. The only way currently for a business or consumer to get an overview of a particular entity is to scour through potentially hundreds or thousands of web pages looking at reviews and comments about the particular entity. This can be time consuming and inaccurate as the top results of the particular ntity may be skewed one way (e.g., overly positive, overly negative, overly neutral) while more relevant results may be harder to find.
In any event, if a customer or business wanted to find out the total overall reputation for a particular entity, especially large entities which may have hundreds of thousands or millions of interactions available on the Internet, the process would be ultimately be impossible.
Another problem with the current state of the art is that even when a customer or business is able to get a rating of a particular entity, there is no way to know if the particular entity's ratings are trending in any particular direction. Most rating systems in use today only provide overall rankings or ratings, not trending information. This information may be particularly useful for entity's with imperfect ratings or rankings. If trending information showed a 4 out of 5 star business had improved its ratings drastically over the past few weeks/months/years, a customer may be more inclined to enter into a transaction with that entity.
Since there is no way in the current state of the art to identify a business's online reputation, entities have a hard time identifying areas of particular weaknesses in their online reputation. Without being able to identify the weaknesses in an entity's online reputation, it is nearly impossible to make a focused and effective effort to improve an entity's overall online reputation.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and method for providing an overall online reputation score to a user, potentially including reputation trending data points, and present recommendations on how to modify the overall online reputation score. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become obvious to one skilled in the art through the summary of the invention that follows.